Fairtrade charity to auction sending #OneBigTweet to supporters’ Twitter followers
Howard Lake | 21 September 2015 | News
The Cafedirect Producers’ Foundation is running a fundraising campaign by auctioning the one-off opportunity to send a tweet to hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers – or more.
Their #OneBigTweet campaign enables Twitter users to donate access to their followers for one message, thereby reaching a potentially vast audience. It won’t cost Twitter users anything, but the Foundation will know exactly how many followers it can reach – and then invite bids for the right to contact them with a single message.
By signing up, Twitter users permit the Foundation to auto-retweet their #OneBigTweet from their account. As they point it, it takes just three clicks to join in.
When authorising your Twitter account, the Foundation will be able to add the number of your Twitter followers to their total reach.
Comforting words (on the right) from OneBigTweet confirming how they’ll use your Twitter account.
They also invite you to take more action to make the tweet even bigger:
My followers were valued at $188.58 by #onebigtweet.
There have been several other donate-a-tweet initiatives including JustCoz.org, which lets you donate a tweet a day to a worth cause, but they don’t have a fundraising element. Thunderclap runs a similar tool where an organisation can gather lots of Twitter (and Facebook) followers to allow their account to send one message on a certain date or time. Again, this access is not offered as a fundraising tool.
Support for #OneBigTweet
The novel campaign has already attracted support from inventor of the hashtag Chris Messina and charity Restless Development, together with musicians and activists.
In the first three days the campaign attracted over 320 people signing up from around the world, ‘donating’ 700,000 followers.
Katie Messick Maddox, Business Development & Investments Manager at CPF, explained:
“When we looked around at the saturated fundraising market, we felt that there’s not much chance for a small charity struggling to be noticed in this environment. Rather than wanting to resort to the same old tactics, we at CPF want to set ourselves out from the crowd.”
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Cafedirect Producers Foundation General Manager, Claire Rhodes added:
“Our programmes with farmers look to support them in developing and sharing their innovations and knowledge with fellow farmers across our smallholder network. #OneBigTweet is designed to reflect this by leveraging social media to create a new kind of crowd-funding movement.”
How do you control the content of the tweet?
Of course, CPF will be careful about what kind of tweet is sent out. They are hoping that it will be bought by a philanthropic individual who would buy the tweet in order to support their work. This could of course benefit their personal or social brand.
Google Impact Challenge
Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation won the Google Impact Challenge in July 2014 and used the £500,000 to launch their first subsidiary social Enterprise, WeFarm.
Could other charities do this?
The technique to carry out this campaign is possible for other charities to emulate. CPF worked with with Enso on this project, who have previously been involved in an online campaign with Greenpeace.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.